The internet has increased our level of awareness to unprecedented heights. For better and for worse, we have had a freedom of information that we have never enjoyed before. One major drawback has been fake news (though the phrase has been co-opted to mean news one disagrees with). Today social media sites are using fake news and other disinformation as an excuse to censor alternative news and information.
Pinterest has banned our website and Facebook has warned us about spreading anti-vaccine information. Even MailChimp has banned anti-vaccine content and Amazon removed books with anti-vaccine information.
A few years ago we saw the writing on the wall and we put our energy towards ensuring we ranked well on the search engines – primarily Google because they account for more than 95% of search engine web traffic.
But on June 3rd, Google had a major algorithm change, which nearly eliminated the organic search results for natural health websites including Green Med Info, Mercola, DrAxe.com, Naturalnews.com, and ours.
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We agree that disinformation is a problem but questioning the prevailing wisdom, raising concerns, and alternative news is imperative for a fair democracy. Censorship is not what we need.
The problem of fake news isn’t solved by hoping for a referee, but rather because we as citizens, we as users of these services, help each other. We talk and we share and we point out what is fake. We point out what is true. The answer to bad speech is not censorship, the answer to bad speech is more speech. We have to exercise and spread the idea that critical thinking matters, now more than ever, given the fact that lies seem to be getting more popular.”
Edward Snowden
This concept is backed up by the fact that the younger generation is better at identifying fake news and other forms of disinformation.
And while Pinterest and MailChimp may mean well, Amazon is getting into big pharma in a big way, Facebook makes a lot of money from the pharmaceutical industry and Mary Ellen Coe, Google’s president of Customer Solutions sits on Merck’s Board of Directors (Merck is one of the world’s largest vaccine manufacturers). And Alphabet (the company that owns Google) is now a pharmaceutical company.
Google today is not only a weapon for promoting the pharmaceutical agenda but now also a drug company itself. During the past six years, Google’s parent company Alphabet has launched two pharmaceutical companies. In 2013, it founded Calico, run by Genentech’s former CEO Arthur Levinson. Calico operates an R&D facility in the San Francisco Bay Area for the discovery of treatments associated with age-related diseases. Two years later, Alphabet founded Verily Life Sciences (previously Google Life Sciences). Both pharma companies are partnering with other drug corporations. Recently, Verily has partnered with the European pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to form a new drug company, Galvani Bioelectronics for the development of “bioelectronic medicines.” The collaboration is costing the companies $715 million, and the new firm is being chaired by Glaxo’s former chairman of its global vaccines business.
Fed Up Democrat
Here are ten alternatives to Google search (sourced from Collective Evolution):
- StartPage – StartPage gives you Google search results, but without the tracking (based in the Netherlands).
- Searx – A privacy-friendly and versatile metasearch engine that’s also open source.
- MetaGer – An open-source metasearch engine with good features, based in Germany.
- SwissCows – A zero-tracking private search engine based in Switzerland, hosted on secure Swiss infrastructure.
- Qwant – A private search engine based in France.
- DuckDuckGo – A private search engine based in the US.
- Mojeek – The only true search engine (rather than metasearch engine) that has its own crawler and index (based in the UK).
- YaCy – A decentralized, open-source, peer-to-peer search engine.
- Givero – Based in Denmark, Givero offers more privacy than Google and combines search with charitable donations.
- Ecosia – Ecosia is based in Germany and donates a part of revenues to planting trees.
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